Ius Machina
by Daemonchan
Summary: They were dragged from the depths of the ocean for a purpose...Kritiker's just machines...
1. one:: shades of pain

Ius Machina

A Weiß Kreuz Alterverse

By Daemonchan

::warnings::

Spoilers for the entirety of Weiß Kreuz, no OVA's.

Shounen ai, mostly recalled and semi-unrequited.

Angst and dark stuffies.

*~*~*~*~

::one:: shades of pain

Once, nothing may have frightened him.

Nothing meant that his existence had ended, had passed into the oblivion of a kind death. He had never believed in anything beyond life; his sins didn't allow for the comforts of heaven. He would rather suffer his hell in darkness.

Is seemed that he wasn't even deserving of Hell.

The days came in shades of agony; red for the moments when near consciousness returned in a screaming wave of fire racing through his veins. Deep blue for a wash of chemical peace, with the red pain hovering along the edges in cresting waves, waiting for the inevitable retreat of the illusionary nothing.

Now black. True, deep, and free. In nothing he could see images sometimes, the past, what he dreamed the future to be, when a future was still his to have. Himself with his love at his side, in school, perhaps with a full time job that demanded nothing more from him than his presence at a desk and his lithe fingers tapping away at keys.

The red haze had already begun to seep into his protective nothing, cracking at the armor he fought to maintain. He had no sense of time, even when the colors brought him from the darkness, but he was aware that the red attacked more frequently, a little less bright each time. The blue had mellowed as well, phasing with the red agony to wash over him with a violet ache.

And, one moment, nothing failed.

It was not red, nor blue, which invaded him this time, but white. Stark, cleansing....familiar white.

_weiß..._

The images were swept up in the maelstrom of bright, and voices began to tease at the barest edges of his psyche. It was nothing he understood at first, the effort to comprehend what was being said distracting him from his efforts to resist the light. The new color meant only one thing, the one thing he had been hiding from in his black.

White meant life.

A voice cut through the colors, the images of past and future. And upon understanding, upon regaining the light he had hoped to never see again, he did what his soul begged him to do.

"Fujimiya-san?"

He screamed.

§ § § § §

White. White was everything.

It was the light in his room, the stiff sheets across his body, the sanitized walls and large rectangles of soundproof tiles banded across the ceiling. Of which there were 27, including the fluorescing panels that paled anything of color in their reach.

He had not seen much more since waking from his drug induced coma to a world of shocking agony. Few memories remained of those first moments, beyond his long unused voice begging to be killed, to be sent back to the nothing where the pain could not reach.

Those first days were red in his mind, his mind and body finally connecting. There were no blue moments, as _they_ explained that they were trying to wean him from the pain medication.

They were one doctor and three nurses, none of whom did he recognize beyond their soft voices and inane questions regarding his current state of being. He hadn't the strength to tell them how he really felt, about his pain, about their treatment, or about the apparent unfairness of his denial of final peace. He just nodded or shook his head, wishing to be left alone...yet taking a guilty pleasure in their attention.

His first real memories, ones without an aura about them, began the day he started to walk again.

§ § § § §

"I was told you were stubborn, Fujimiya-san," the young therapist scowled at the boy in the wheelchair before him. Listless violet eyes sparked with anger for a moment, hands gripping the arms of the chair as if he would do what he was asked. He was carefully enrobed in a stark white hospital gown, with pale white scrubs sparing him the indignity of going through the facility completely nude. The boy looked like a ghost, with only his blood red hair as a sign of realism about his frame.

The therapist sighed. The red head was hopeless. He had worked passively while still bed ridden, doing what was needed to be allowed out of bed. He made no sound as his legs were pushed to his chest and stretched back, or as his arms were moved in pantomime of true movement. Ran had made a quick recovery despite this, most likely because of the treatment he had received in his coma.

Ran didn't want to look at the therapist, a kid barely older than himself. Walking again meant the he admitted to being alive, instead of the death he had longed for. Memories of _before_ had begun to seep back into his life, of his life with...Aya-chan...with Weiß...with...

He was still ignorant of the fate his team or his sister. He didn't know who had taken the effort to drag him from the watery grave of the fallen temple. He had a very low opinion of the person who had had that bright thought. Bringing him back from the dead may have not been the most intelligent move on their part.

Still, perhaps his recovery was a bargaining chip. They obviously wanted him to become fully functional again, as evidenced by the frazzled young therapist standing at the other end of the parallel bars. After a full week of making the other lift his deceptively slight body to and from the chair, just to sit and stare at the ceiling through careless eyes, the boy kept coming back. They wanted him whole, he wanted information.

"You," he whispered, voice still hoarse from disuse. He didn't talk to his doctor or nurses, replying only with small movements of his head. The therapist looked up sharply, dark eyes wide with surprise.

"You _can_ talk," he quipped, humor falling short at Ran's unamused face.

Ran leaned forward. "I'll make you a deal." His hands folded before him, body slowly recovering its previous grace. The therapist swallowed hard, suddenly reminded that nearly invalid or not, the boy before him was deadly, a trained assassin. "I'll do whatever is asked of me...this," he gestured negligently to the bars, "or any other monkey tricks they want me to do."

The therapist recovered long enough to realize that Ran had finally accepted the unpleasant truth that he was indeed alive, and that there was more to his rescue than met the eye. "Tell me your demands, and I will ask my superiors, Fujimiya-san."

"First of all, call me Ay-," he caught himself, eyes blinking once. "Ran." No one had called him by his family name since before Aya-chan's accident. Hearing the polite Japanese brought up memories that had no place in his present...happiness better left behind.

It had been hard enough to say his own; it was still unfamiliar to his ears and voice.

He stared hard at the young man before him, watching him pale. "For every session of therapy that I suffer through, I will ask a question. It must be answered. No dealing, no reneging. The question does not matter."

The boy nodded once, walking thoughtfully along the length of the bars. "Do you honestly believe you will get the answers you seek?"

Determined violet glanced up once. Ran laughed harshly. "For some reason or another, I seem to have become indispensable to Kritiker, a far cry from my previous standing on the ladder in life." He folded his hands in his lap, taking time to straighten the stiff linen of his gown. "They will answer me...because you were told I was stubborn."

§ § § § §

Ran became eerily aware of his body over the next week of therapy. His legs seemed to have lost none of their muscle tone, a contradiction to the atrophy that occurred with extended bed rest. He was up and walking within three days, with only three of his questions answered.

"Is my team alive?"

"Yes." An evasive answer. Eyes focused on Ran's legs as they were lowered from the chair to the ground. "Your team is alive."

Ran knew that he would have to word his questions carefully. Therapist or not, the boy was still trained as a Kritiker agent. He could avoid the true answer in a thousand different ways.

The second day brought a new tact to Ran's questioning.

"What is your name?"

That surprised the boy standing with an encouraging smile as his charge walked the length of the bars. "Oh. Well...it's Ichirio Yomi."

If Yomi expected more from Ran, he was again surprised. His question asked, the white assassin had returned to his task of walking with determined stoicism. He didn't really need the bars; his balance had returned after the fourth trip down the length on his first day. His hands tingled with the urge to discover if he could weild his blade as quickly and as well as he had regained his ability to walk.

But suspicion didn't set in until his third day.

§ § § § §

It was crushed.

Nothing remained of the aluminum bar that had once been the shocked assassin's guide as he performed his daily therapy.

He was angry. He couldn't recall why, perhaps it was another evasive answer to his question about the location of his team. It could have been that he was sure that something was wrong with the fact that he was up and walking, not to mention having kept himself occupied with advanced kata in his room. He hadn't broken a sweat or taken a harsh breath through the entire form; his body was in perfect condition.

He should be weak as a...kitten.

Instead he had crushed a thick aluminum pole as if it were nothing.

His body had returned to normal....well, beyond in a matter of _days_ instead of the months of excruciating therapy he should be going through. He felt stronger, moved faster...felt better than he had in his life.

"What did they do to me?"

Yomi's voice was hushed...and infinitely sad. "That, Fujimiya-san, is the one question I cannot answer."

::owari one:: 


	2. two:: vain & bloodied

::ius machina::  
::two:: vain & bloodied

Kudou Youji hated waiting.

Even with Weiß, he was always moving, either in a effort to avoid work, or to cater to his dubious addictions; Youji couldn't stand to sit still for long. His evasive manner came off as lazy, but in his line of work, impressions worked for you.

He gripped the pane of the one window in his small room, figure covered with slatted shadows from the drawn blinds. He found that he could twist them open and closed, but not raise them. Not that the view was spectacular anyway.

His room looked out onto another room, and, from the size of the figures moving on the floor below, he was on the second story of the Kritiker hospital. Further examination revealed that the building extended further up, too far for him to make out any rafters. The open area was crossed by layers of metal stairways, with white coated technicians making their busy ways back and forth during the day.

He looked down from the window for a moment, staring at his other hand.

Two days ago, he could have said it was a perfectly ordinary hands. Two days ago, he had been coming down from a drug haze that left little room for him to notice that his hands were indeed _perfect_. Years of training with wire had left more scars than skin. Those scars had been wiped clean, leaving unmarred flesh that he could barely acknowledge as his own.

Youji examined his hands from every angle, trying each finger and as if it were some illusion. No pain from the overused joints and strained ligaments, no lacing scars across the base of the digits he wound the wire around for support.

_Perfect._

Further examination revealed what looked like black lines tattooed into his left palm. They were thin and nearly invisible. He touched the lines with his fingers, curling his hand into a fist.

And flung his arm away in horror as a small square of flesh pulled back like a sliding door.

It was more than half an hour and a battle against tears later that he discovered the wire.

The wire was slimmer than what he was used to. His familiar garrote was thicker, and nearly transparent. This filament slipped across his fingers with only the whisper of a touch. It would have been lost save for the fact that he could see it against his hands, could pick out the details of swirls and ridges that made up his fingerprints. If he concentrated hard enough he could see the pores on his skin...

He had taken the acute vision in stride. After waking in a stark white hospital room, surrounded by tight lipped, yet attractive, Kritiker nurses, nothing surprised him. Well, his hand had, but now he treated the unnatural ability with mild disgust and curiosity. Drugged to the gills and beyond, body mummified in a fight wrap of gauze and Ace, Kudou Youji had cried. Whether it was from the incredible pain, or despair that he had indeed opened his eyes to find himself alive....or if he was overjoyed at another chance....

No. His capacity for surprise had been stolen by the wonder he felt with every breath, every heart beat more that he was able to live.

Granted, his assassin's lifestyle hadn't been the career of his choosing, and many times he had thrown himself into missions with the same hopeful abandon that his teammates did: maybe this one would be the last.

Somehow, he was sure that his second chance came without a price.

He was able to move fairly quickly, his legs and arms achy from whatever the doctors had done to save him. What a mess he must have been...

_Water dripped in a steady pattern across his cheek, running in an annoying river straight into one nostril. Youji snorted forcefully, bringing himself to full consciousness, too tired to open his eyes. He lay quietly, taking a mental assessment of his injuries. Two arms, legs...eyes nearly blacked shut...whole lot of blood everywhere. He tried pulling his arms and found they were stuck tight, crucified to either side. He could still feel his fingers and the last stretch of his wire still curled in his fist._

_He tried moving his legs, surprised at the curious weight across them. It was too light to be stone, yet still enough to keep him from doing much more than wiggle his toes. He decided that maybe it was safe enough to open his eyes._

_Still just as dark as the backside of his eyelids. Damn._

_He began working his legs slightly, grimacing at the flashes of pain that arched through his hips. Something was at least fractured down there. Suddenly, something recognizable brushed against skin that had been exposed when the jags of rock tore away parts of his clothing._

_Human skin. Someone was here with him._

_Someone who was not moving. Youji held his breath until his heartbeat was loud in his ears. Nothing. His was the only sign of life..._

_Youji screamed into the darkness, blood thick in his throat. He was pinned like a butterfly ready to be examined, his arms under two large blocks of stone, and his legs....there was a body across his legs..._

Youji passed his hand in front of his eyes, dispelling the horror of his entrapment. He had been conscious in the twisted wreck of the temple...for days, weeks, hours....he didn't care to wonder. It had been awful enough to stare into what he imagined was the slack face of the person...no, body that had paralyzed his legs with terror as well as dead weight.

He leaned into the window frame, left hand coming up to scratch absently at the gauze that wrapped his torso, ending in a spiral at the juncture between his chin and neck. He hadn't tried to remove the white bandage, afraid of what it was covering. Everything but his face was masked, including his feet. A light blue pair of scrubs had been his clothing for the few days he'd been out of bed, though he'd hoped for a butt baring robe just to get some reaction out of his quiet nurses.

He watched lazily as the people passed beneath his window, barely registering the familiar cascade of red hair walking towards his side of the building. It was another moment before recognition hit.

_Masaka..._

As if the figure had heard him, she looked up and smiled. He could almost hear the familiar footfalls on the steel lattice beneath her, and a ghost of her scent teased his memory.

The door to his room opened, a nurse banging in with a tray in one hand. He left the window, catching her burden before it had a chance to fall to the floor. She smiled brightly, but said nothing as she motioned for him to sit on the bed.

Youji studied the instruments on the tray. Scissors, a stitch kit, butterfly bandages, and two fair sized mirrors. His heart jumped painfully. She had come to remove the bandages.

"Remove your clothes, Kudou-san."

With a casual smirk, Youji slipped out of his robe and scrubs. "You know, ojou-san..."

She touched a smooth finger to his lips. "I was told you were quite the sweet talker, Kudou-san. However, I'm just here to do my job."

Youji did not argue further as her slim hands pushed him back onto the bed. She picked up the scissors and began cutting the material at his wrist and up to his shoulder, Her fingers trailed along behind the blade and Youji felt a familiar tightening in his groin.

Nice to know some things hadn't changed.

Youji closed his eyes, reassuring himself that it was just so he could enjoy the nurse's heated touch and not to hide from what he feared lay under the white gauze. The soft material slipped from his body, his arms and chest, then he was guided to stand, and his legs were freed. He was suddenly aware of being naked and half aroused, with the nurse's hand still on his hip.

"Kudou-san. Miemasu ka?"

Youji looked down at the soft question, catching his reflection in one of the mirrors. His thick blonde hair had been cut at some time in the past when he was unconscious. It was barely to his ears, yet still carefully trimmed. He took it from the nurse, and she moved around behind him. Together, they examined his body, the mirror in her hand allowing him to see the pale curves of his back and buttocks.

All his fears were for nothing...and yet somehow confirmed. His body was slim, pale, and just as he remembered it. But where were the marks from his bullet wound when Asuka was killed? The scars from his ordeal in the temple? His torso was clear, showing nothing but toned muscles and a fine six pack of abs. His legs and arms bore no signs of the hard life he had lived as a private investigator and then assassin.

His skin was flawless. Just like his hands.

_Perfect._

::owari two:: 


End file.
